David B. Allison
Biostatistician and obesity researcher, long at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and later dean of public health at Indiana University, known for work on nutrition, obesity and research rigour
Dean, Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington (appointed 2017) · Distinguished Professor, Quetelet Endowed Professor and Director of the NIH Nutrition Obesity Research Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham · fellowship, Columbia University and St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center (1994) · postdoc, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (1991) · PhD, Hofstra University (1990)
Portrait: Baylor College of Medicine
David Allison is a co-author of MAT2017, a Nature Communications paper that brought together the two long-running studies of caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys, one at the National Institute on Aging and one at the University of Wisconsin. The two studies had seemed to disagree: Wisconsin reported longer survival with fewer calories, the NIA study did not. Looking at both side by side, the authors found that calorie-restricted monkeys were healthier in both studies. Whether they also lived longer depended on how each study was designed, including the age at which restriction started and what the control monkeys ate. Monkeys are close relatives of humans, so these studies are among the best animal evidence on eating less and ageing. Caloric restriction is one of the conditions in which mTOR activity falls, which is why it appears in this Atlas.
Allison's part in such work is mainly statistical. After a PhD at Hofstra University in 1990, with a thesis on types of obese persons, he did postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins and a fellowship at Columbia University and St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. At the University of Alabama at Birmingham he was a Distinguished Professor, Quetelet Endowed Professor and Director of the NIH-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center. His research covers obesity and nutrition, biostatistics, quantitative genetics and clinical trials, and the rigour and reproducibility of research; he helped organise a 2017 National Academy of Sciences colloquium on reproducibility.
In 2017 Allison was appointed dean of the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington. The current position after that could not be confirmed, so the affiliation shown is the one on the Atlas paper.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | A | Caloric restriction improves health and survival of rhesus monkeys MAT2017 Co-author of the joint analysis of the NIA and Wisconsin monkey studies, which found health benefits of caloric restriction in both and survival effects that depended on study design. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 3
People with a profile here who share at least one study with David B. Allison.
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- Julie A. Mattison Primate aging researcher at the US National Institute on Aging who led the NIA study of calorie restriction in rhesus monkeys and its comparison with the Wisconsin study
- Rafael de Cabo Aging researcher at the US National Institute on Aging who has studied calorie restriction, fasting and drugs that mimic them in mice and rhesus monkeys, including the long-running NIA monkey study
- Rozalyn M. Anderson Professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the basic biology of aging and how calorie restriction slows it, and senior author of the 2017 comparison of the two long-running rhesus monkey calorie restriction studies
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